In 1991, a year after his big retrospective at the Fuller Museum of Art, Henry Schwartz painted a series of small dark allegorical scenes mixing burlesque dancers, portraits of German intellectuals, crying women, and dense cities. Soon after, he would fall into a debilitating depression that he would not emerge from until early 2007. Those 1991 paintings, now being exhibited for the first time at Gallery NAGA, are the last he has made.
This eight-painting exhibition coincides with a career-spanning retrospective of 35 paintings, drawings, and prints by Arthur Polonsky at the Danforth Museum. Both men are part of the Boston Expressionists, a loose group of local artists that first became known and linked in the 1930s and '40s for their moody, painterly realism. The Polonsky and Schwartz shows demonstrate the range of the style.
Boston Expressionism mixes symbolic narrative, mysticism, surrealism, and political and social satire. "I never delved into complete abstractionism because it didn't speak to me of human experience," says Schwartz. He's 80 now, hard of hearing, unable to walk, but feisty, living in a Newton retirement home and drawing again. "It was decorative. Kokoschka called it 'patches for the pants.' "
Schwartz's NAGA show, "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Approaching the Vanishing Point," offers midnight fever dreams of sex and death, inspired by his youth in Revere, and his love-hate relationship with German culture. "How could a nation produce an Adolf Hitler and a Beethoven?" Schwartz says. "There is a paradox I've never been able to resolve."
"Postcards From Revere No. 1: The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" depicts the head of a crying blond woman. The painting was done on Plexiglas and the eyes are Man Ray's famous "Tears" photo pasted on the back. Her face, with her wide-open mouth, seems to be the facade of a funhouse. Women walk up the diagonal avenue before her, with their skirts blowing up. Along the right side, streets are lined with carnival buildings topped with concentration camp chimneys.
In "Untitled (classical composers and chorus line)," nearly naked women dance before an audience of creative heroes - Mozart, Wagner, Toscanini, Mussorgsky, James Joyce. In "Untitled (dreaming figure)," a dreamy topless lady floats in a tar-black bay between a tangle of urban neighborhoods.
In "Self-Portrait Sculpting a Head of Bruckner," Schwartz imagines himself in a white smock delicately sculpting the lips of a giant bald gray Bruckner bust. It has the feel of Dr. Frankenstein crafting his monster. The other paintings are clotted and crusty, but here the paint is applied in thin brushy glazes, melting turpentine drips, and scratched through. There are sharp flashes in the show, but the paintings feel unresolved, missing the density and intensity of his peak work of the 1980s, with its majestic desiccated squalor.
Polonsky's Danforth retrospective, titled "A Thief of Light," catalogs his development, from a curdled 1947 self-portrait, to a wild-haired Samson from 1959 lounging seductively atop a pile of smashed corpses at the seaside, to 1990s realist ink wash drawings of slumbering nursing-home residents.
Polonsky, 82, who also lives in Newton, draws inspiration from literature, religion, and myth as he builds allegorical scenes that he hopes feel as convincing as the middle of a dream. He says he composes intuitively, often more motivated by color and shape than symbolism.
"The Survivors" (1959) depicts what appears to be a long-necked woman, her face an oasis of calm in the midst of wild orange hair and a billowing blue robe. A small orange head hides in her hair, and maybe the rest of the figure's body rests upon her back. Polonsky's brush strokes are turbulent, but nearly all the same weight, maybe half an inch wide and a few inches long, which flattens their energy.
"A Stream Mystery" (circa 1962) is nearly abstract. The top, apparently a riverbank, is brushy rusty brown with patches of orange-red. The bottom, the stream, is pale white, with some canvas showing through. But the paint remains tethered to reality by Polonsky's title, and a pair of heads that appear in the water, one gazing down placidly, the second just a pair of nervous eyes. It's like a moment from a hokey horror movie. His mystical visionary scenes often feel curious, but random, and sometimes forced. And the allegories seem to hold back his painting.
Landscapes from the past 15 years seem to have offered more room to let loose. In his 1992 gouache "Marine Elegy," layered vigorous strokes of red and gold explode against a blue sky, and reflect in water below. A pair of tree trunks frame the landscape in his 2002 painting "Morning Light." The trunks are rendered in brown paint scratched and dragged over black verticals. Long thin lines make the branches. They frame an alley of trees, constructed with short turquoise and green brush strokes densely built up to suggest branches and foliage. The gap between the trees is flaming red, like sunset, or a fuse burning down.
